Soul Goes Home : Entertainment: Motor City Records is trying to bring a piece of the Motown sound back to its birthplace in Detroit.

“Do you hear the beat? Do you hear it? Ba ba ba, ba ba ba ba ba ba. Sidestepping. . . .” Bobby Taylor of Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers is in full voice now, belting out “Sidestepping,” a pop/R & B song he had written just a few hours earlier.

That Taylor has written a new song is hardly news; he’s been in the music business almost forever. But where he’s writing his songs--now, that is unique.

He’s back in Motown.

Taylor has joined forces with more than 100 ex-Motown acts in an effort to bring a little piece of the recording industry back to Detroit, the hometown of soul.

Here in a studio tucked away in a nondescript row house in Detroit’s inner city--not far from the small house where Berry Gordy Jr. founded Motown Records so many years ago--a 35-year-old British producer named Ian Levine is working miracles--without Smokey.

And without Diana, Michael and Stevie, for that matter; the big headliners of Motown’s glory days are all locked up with major record labels and command major dollars.

But Levine, a self-described Motown fanatic, is the man behind this Detroit reunion. He has founded Motor City Records and has lined up virtually every lesser-known ex-Motown act--including Kim Weston, Mary Wells, Marv Johnson and Martha Reeves--to re-create and update the old Motown Sound, here where it all began.

“I think it’s a great thing that’s happening, a Motown for the 1990s,” said Johnny Bristol, a longtime Motown producer, writer and singer who has signed up with Levine. “This is music to me.”

Since Motor City Records began a year ago, Levine’s label has recorded more than 300 songs--some new and some remakes of old hits--and it plans on producing hundreds more in recording sessions in Detroit and in Los Angeles and London as well. While most of the songs are by groups that haven’t had a recording contract--let alone a hit--in years, Levine has attracted some big names.

The Contours, for instance, who revived their 1962 hit “Do You Love Me” for the movie “Dirty Dancing,” have signed up. And Levine is now trying to negotiate with Junior Walker on a deal to get Motown’s greatest sax player back into the recording studio.

Levine’s records already have sold about 100,000 copies overseas, from Britain to Japan, and now he’s finally ready to crack the American market. Levine has just signed an agreement that calls for his records to be distributed here soon by Capitol-EMI, one of the nation’s biggest record companies.

“I don’t think people like Berry Gordy took us seriously until we got the distribution agreement,” Levine said.

Indeed, his idea of bringing the Motown Sound back to Detroit once seemed a pipe dream.

Ever since Berry Gordy and his Motown Records left Detroit for the bright lights of Los Angeles in 1972, the musical scene in Detroit has been nearly invisible. And, over the years, many of Motown’s oldest acts, mostly from Detroit, lost their way--lost that thing in music that makes you hot or makes you not--and were cast aside.

“It hurts to think of all the talent that has gone to waste,” Levine said with a sigh.

So, by the time Gordy sold Motown in 1988 to a joint venture between MCA and Boston Ventures, an investment partnership, many of the singers, songwriters and producers who had turned Motown’s old “Hitsville USA” offices in Detroit into a hothouse of creativity and talent had scattered around the country.

Ironically, it took a kid from the north of England to bring them back together, a white producer who refused to believe that soul was dead in Detroit.

“In Detroit, the sound has always been here,” said Sylvia Moy, a former Motown songwriter who owns the sophisticated recording studios in the Detroit row house that Levine is working from. “It’s part of the pavement, part of the street. But Ian’s been a big boost, not only to music here but to the whole city.”

Growing up in a small British resort town, one ear glued to the radio, Levine got hooked early on the Supremes, the Temptations, Marvin Gaye and the rest of Motown’s hit-makers. “Motown was bigger there than it was in the States,” Levine said. “All the smaller acts that maybe only had one hit in America were huge over there.”

By the time he was 18, Levine was able to turn his passion into a living, when he started working as a disc jockey in British clubs where the “Detroit” sound was being kept alive. When he was 20, a British record company asked him to put together an album of rare “Detroit” tracks; it went to 11th place on the British pop charts, and Levine was on his way as a record producer.

By 1986, Levine had his own record label in London, but he also had a crazy dream--putting Motown back together.

His first break came when he was able to line up Kim Weston, perhaps best remembered for “It Takes Two,” a 1967 duet with Marvin Gaye, for a recording session in 1987. Then followed Mary Wells, best known for her 1964 hit “My Guy,” who recorded with Levine while working in London.

Soon Levine “started getting letters from all over the world, from Motown fans asking us to find other long-lost Motown artists,” he recalled. So in March, 1989, Levine announced, at a reunion ceremony held outside Motown’s old Hitsville USA office--now a Motown museum--that he was bringing the old, unsigned Motown acts together again under one label.

“We gave these artists a home,” Levine said.

Indeed, as producers, writers and singers mingled in Sylvia Moy’s recording studios during a recent session, it seemed that Levine was bringing back not just the music but the family atmosphere of Motown’s early days as well. It is, as Levine said, “a labor of love.”